Pope opposes gay marriage but is afraid to admit it

The Pope had a secret meeting with Kim Davis while he was in the US. That was actually the defining moment of his visit.

I don’t like any organised religions. I find them – every one – oppressive in the space of ignorance. So, I don’t have a very high opinion of any “religious leaders” in their formal roles. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a decent, well-meaning guy but, as Pope Francis, he has the task – uneviable though it may be – to oppress not only his own catholics with dogmatic mumbo-jumbo, but to try and spread his particular creed of ignorance to others not of the faith.

I found the circus surrounding his recent visit to the US irritating, not just because of the “populist”, politically correct facade he presented, but even more because of the fawning media hanging on his every word, and the politicians slobbering over his pronouncements as they tried to pander to their catholic voters. (There are 70 million catholics making up 22% of the US population).

But just one secret meeting is the real take-away from his 6 day visit. Publicly he said all the right things about minorities and he even met victims of abuse by priestly members of the catholic church. (Though, when he was reported as saying that “God weeps” for these victims, I wondered whether that was all his God could do? And was his God weeping at His own inability to do anything for the suffering that He had caused?)

His secret meeting was with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to authorise gay marriages.

HuffPo: The Vatican has confirmed that the meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis took place. “I do not deny that the meeting took place, but I have no further comments,” Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement.

A Kentucky clerk who went to jail for defying a federal court’s orders to issue same-sex marriage licenses says she met briefly with the pope during his historic visit to the United States. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, didn’t deny the encounter took place but said Wednesday in Rome he had no comment on the topic.

Rowan County clerk Kim Davis and her husband met privately with Pope Francis last Thursday afternoon at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., for less than 15 minutes, said her lawyer, Mat Staver.

Why was the meeting in secret?

And how come the fawning media missed this even though the Pope was being scrutinised for every second of his visit?

Robert Moynihan, who first reported the news Tuesday night for Inside the Vatican, a magazine he launched in 1993, met Davis in her Washington hotel room shortly after her Sept. 24 meeting with Francis, but sat on the scoop for days as the pope’s trip made headlines.

…. Moynihan wrote that Davis told him about her meeting with Francis shortly after it occurred, though he did not specify where or when she gave the account:

“The Pope spoke in English,” she told me. “There was no interpreter. ‘Thank you for your courage,’ Pope Francis said to me. I said, ‘Thank you, Holy Father.’ I had asked a monsignor earlier what was the proper way to greet the Pope, and whether it would be appropriate for me to embrace him, and I had been told it would be okay to hug him. So I hugged him, and he hugged me back. It was an extraordinary moment. ‘Stay strong,’ he said to me. Then he gave me a rosary as a gift, and he gave one also to my husband, Joe. I broke into tears. I was deeply moved.”

…… ABC News’ Terry Moran askedFrancis if he would support individuals, including government officials, who refuse to carry out duties such as issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples if they believe doing so violates their religious liberty.

Francis said that “conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right.” When Moran asked if his response includes government officials, Francis responded that, indeed, “it is a human right.”

The messages I take are that

The Pope actually disapproves of gay marriage, but

He is afraid to say that publicly (because it is not politically correct).

For the Pope to claim conscientious objection as a human right is almost naive. I find that conscientious objection is one of those flexible concepts that every government thinks that others must do but never accepts within its own ranks. Nazi soldiers were wrong – and were even war criminals – for obeying orders and not being conscientious objectors. But I can’t see any government anywhere which would accept conscientious objection within the ranks of its own armies. Or its bureaucrats such as Kim Davis. “Your whistle-blower is a good guy, but my whistle-blower is a traitor”.

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This entry was posted on October 1, 2015 at 8:17 am and is filed under Behaviour, Politics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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